Paul Frazee

Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, it's funny, honestly. Like, moderation is a tough job, as you might expect. And things like that... I don't know why nobody else has done it before because, gosh, anytime people can fix the problem for themselves, that actually makes our lives easier. So we have a pretty good incentive to do this sort of stuff.

Removing the quote posts, that one was like, we didn't do it straight away, but that was one that I had personally right from the get-go. Because we all know that the quote dunking is one of the big generators of just some of the most painful experiences on...

twitter at least and i imagine anywhere else that has a similar dynamic and so the detaching a quote post is essentially like it it's it just takes away whatever the quote quoting post is it just detaches it it's just whatever they've quoted it now just says content no longer available and so now you know of course what people do instead is they'll screenshot whatever it was that they originally of course of course they will but that's actually still better because

the things that you got to think about with large-scale social spaces is friction friction matters so much it matters so much and when you can introduce points of friction you're actually able to because it is such a game of numbers you actually will dramatically reduce bad outcomes and If you can just slow people down.

And the reason that the quote posts are so painful whenever they're quote dunks is that it sends a horde of people with one tap into the replies to start dogging you for whatever it is that you're getting dunked for. And honestly, if you've ever... I've witnessed a friend of mine get a really aggressive raid army kind of directed at them with a quote tweet back in, I want to say, 2017.

Well, we didn't make them public for that reason. I'll start. But actually, the blocks are, mutes are private, blocks are public. The reason that is, is actually kind of a limitation of the design of the protocol because you need the blocks to be public for the applications and really all applications to be able to respect them.

And so you can do the mutes privately because only the application needs to know. It's just filtering things to the recipient, but the blocks kind of had to get broadcast.

And you could come up with a privacy scheme for that where you just give the blocks to the applications in the world, but there's no well-defined set of applications without creating some kind of a organization which has like membership. And at that point, you're essentially starting to create a cartel around the protocol.

And maybe that's where all this goes someday, but for now we're not about to start that action. So we just decided, you know what, we can't find a better way to do blocks. They're going to have to be public. So that's why they're public. That said, there's a lot of other interesting things about blocks and the fact that we implemented what we call moderation lists.

So these are lists that you can mute or block. implemented that pretty early on, again, as a part of the application's kind of decentralized moderation. And we also made blocks really aggressive. Sometimes people call them the nuclear block. Where not only do they sort of like in Twitter, as I recall, it would sort of freeze the interactions between you two.

So you would no longer see each other's stuff, but like your previous interactions would just kind of be frozen in time and public. On Blue Sky, it actually causes all interactions previously between you to also essentially go away. They just show content not available.

And so we actually have a very sort of really aggressive toolkit for blocking, and we're encouraging people to put together block lists and to subscribe to them. And again, that kind of gets into the point of view that we have, which is just that there are just some people who can't coexist very well. And I don't think trying to force them to do that is a great idea.

I think that's why you get so much toxicity in social networks. And it felt even more pressing when we're creating this open design and sort of like

loosening up the control that we have over participation, we wanted a way to articulate really aggressively, almost like your own perimeter, since the website is no longer a perimeter for the social network, being able to say, no, this is kind of a group that I'm keen to be hanging out with. And if you're in this list, I'm not, I just don't want to be in the same public space as you.

And it comes with pros and cons, you know, I won't say that it's like a pure win. Sometimes it can be really frustrating for people, I'm quite sure. But I think it's important that people are able to make that choice for themselves. I don't really like the idea that people should be forced to share space with each other. So that's the mentality.

Yeah. Yeah. Now we're attracting raids, right? Like, the persistent, automated, like, harassment campaigns. And so we've had to really aggressively scale up our tooling to deal with that. And, you know, that is... Thankfully, we designed the whole system to be prepared for that. We just had to get the tooling in place. But then, you know, on a long enough timeline, we all know the game.

Like, the bot fight is hard, and it just got a whole lot harder with AI. And we're starting to putz around with a couple of things that might help with that. But yeah, somebody, some jerks made a... AI bot army that just would disagree a little bit with people. That was their angle.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Thanks a lot, you know?

Oh, gosh. I wouldn't say it's terribly surprised. I mean, it's discouraging. It definitely makes you go, ah, I wish better of the world, but we all know it's a bit of a dark forest, so...